Work Faster with New Performance Enhancements
MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 includes significant enhancements that make business intelligence faster for BI users, even at the highest scale of usage. Organizations today are faced with rapidly expanding data volumes and users, partners, and customers that need immediate data access to work more efficiently. MicroStrategy’s latest release can meet these expanding demands with even higher performance than before.

“The demand for BI systems to provide faster data access is scaling at a rapid pace and requires dramatically more efficient technology,” said Mark Smith, CEO and EVP of Research at Ventana Research. “MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 introduces enhanced performance and power to deliver interactive analytics that are easily architected, assembled, and deployed via dashboards and new forms of information applications.”

Faster Analysis
MicroStrategy’s new release includes substantial performance improvements that enable business users to perform speed-of-thought analytical investigations to answer key business questions in significantly less time. Organizations can now provide information to thousands of employees and business partners with reliably high performance.

New data compression algorithms in MicroStrategy’s in-memory BI technology enable MicroStrategy in-memory cubes to store up to three times as much data as before and thus provide users with greater analytical depth and breadth. Additionally, new in-memory query algorithms can deliver answers twice as fast. Testing at MicroStrategy Labs and at customer sites show that MicroStrategy’s latest release of in-memory technology can deliver up to four times as many reports as before using the same customer servers, with an average response time of less than two seconds.

“Organizations continue to be forced to do more with less – less hardware, less people, less time,” said Cindi Howson, Founder of BIScorecard. “MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 brings improvements to its in-memory algorithms that improve both real-time query performance, load times to OLAP caches, and memory required. While MicroStrategy 9 had excellent data scalability, the latest enhancements allow for more user scalability, even with complex analytic queries.”

Faster Web Interactivity
MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 delivers higher performance for data interactions. Testing shows that business users will see up to two times faster performance for their common data manipulations such as sorting, filtering, slicing, and calculations; and faster navigation, browsing, and searching. The code improvements cause less data to be transmitted, streamline processing, and use less Web server memory. As a result, MicroStrategy Web users gain these performance benefits upon upgrading to MicroStrategy 9 Release 2.

Faster Dashboards
MicroStrategy’s highly-visual, data-rich Dynamic Dashboards are significantly faster in MicroStrategy 9 Release 2. Dashboard users will experience faster dashboard load times and faster dashboard interactivity as a result of enhanced data compression algorithms and new rendering algorithms. Also, new on-demand data transfer technology will load data into dashboards incrementally, as users need them rather than all at once, enabling users to view the dashboard up to ten times faster.

Faster Data Loading
Creating in-memory cubes has been enhanced in MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 to allow organizations to incorporate more data into memory within regular data loading windows. New data loading algorithms in MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 allow in-memory data to be loaded 30% faster than before, allowing companies to load more data into memory during their batch window.

“The enhanced performance in MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 will allow us to distribute more information to our BI user population in much less time,” said Joyce Vonada, Senior Vice President IT Business Solutions, Lowe’s Companies. “In our recent tests, we saw a 30% performance improvement for both in-memory BI and our most frequently used dashboard.”

Deliver More BI with Less Effort
As BI becomes more prevalent across enterprises, the workload for IT personnel expands dramatically. MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 offers numerous enhancements that enable IT staff to deliver more information with less effort, resulting in a lower total cost of ownership.

Easier to Get Started
Companies can rapidly create new BI applications using MicroStrategy’s Jump-Start Project. New in MicroStrategy 9 Release 2, the Jump-Start Project includes more than 30 pre-designed reports and dashboards that can be directly connected to existing databases, providing people with immediate use of their new BI application. Suitable for any vertical or horizontal application, these dashboards and reports can satisfy initial reporting requirements and can be expanded as more reports and dashboards are needed.

Easier to Architect
The ability to quickly deploy new applications is critical, and MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 offers improved capabilities that enable organizations to get BI applications up and running in less time. The new Graphical Architect features auto-modeling heuristics that make project setup as much as eight times faster for new BI applications, reducing the time to create BI applications from days or weeks to hours.

“In today’s increasingly competitive business environment the ability to quickly deploy new applications is critical,” said Wayne Eckerson, Director of TDWI Research at The Data Warehousing Institute. “I am impressed with MicroStrategy’s auto-modeling heuristics, which make project setup far easier. As an enterprise BI vendor, MicroStrategy is up to the challenge of being as easy to use and deploy as newer departmental BI vendors, without losing its advantage of enterprise scalability and architectural soundness.”

Easier to Operate
MicroStrategy Health Center, a new product available at no cost to MicroStrategy customers, automatically scans all MicroStrategy servers to anticipate and correct system problems, and provides coordination with MicroStrategy Technical Support Centers. With MicroStrategy Health Center, system performance is enhanced through problem prevention and system uptime is improved with faster issue resolution.

“Con-way is looking forward to MicroStrategy’s new Health Center product that can provide our administrators peace of mind knowing that system problems can be automatically identified and resolution information would be readily available,” said Sean Devine, Vice President Pricing and Engineering, Con-way Freight. “The new automated administrative features in MicroStrategy’s latest release will enable our IT personnel to work more efficiently, saving valuable time and resources.”

Easier Dashboard Applications
MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 introduces major enhancements to its Dynamic Dashboards technology to deliver easy-to-use dashboards to thousands of business users every day. This next generation dashboard application, called “DashboardApps,” can contain an entire day’s worth of information for BI users within a single dashboard. Simple-to-use, DashboardApps do not require any training or special software to install. DashboardApps are self-contained dashboards that can be personalized for the recipients and delivered via e-mail before each work day begins.

“MicroStrategy is committed to delivering the best business intelligence platform and products, and providing exceptional service to our customers,” said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy COO. “MicroStrategy 9 Release 2 delivers exciting new enhancements that can improve worker productivity, helping BI users to quickly get answers to their business questions. In addition, the powerful new tools in our latest release enable IT personnel to deliver more BI with less effort.”

Over the past decade, MarineMax has experienced tremendous growth. Today, the company can be found in 55 locations across the United States, with a multi-channel retail model that includes showrooms, catalogs, a call center and a full-service online presence. With this expansion came the need for stronger, more collaborative information management across the enterprise. Previously, critical data was trapped in many disparate spreadsheets and systems, making it very difficult for business leaders and frontline employees to access and share information on sales, costs and inventory.

With IBM business analytics software in place, MarineMax has benefited from significant operational efficiencies across all levels of the company. Store managers now capitalize on self-service reporting and faster access to their store performance, helping them make better decisions about their merchandising and promotions. Finance is able to enforce a more consistent company-wide budgeting process to ensure forecast accuracy, and can focus on long-term planning and strategic performance analysis. Additionally, senior executives gain a holistic, real-time view of historical, current and projected enterprise performance to ensure company objectives are always on target.

A more efficient budgeting, forecasting and analysis process was, in fact, the primary driver for the new IBM system. Prior solutions were unstable and lacked key functionality such as re-forecasting, and “what if” scenario modeling to determine the impact of business decisions. With IBM, operational units across MarineMax can now easily work together from the same numbers to build integrated budgets and plans – a process that today only takes weeks instead of months – and evaluate performance against plans.

These new-found forecasting efficiencies were especially critical in the area of demand planning. Generally, global retailers experience lead times as long as 6 to 10 months, forcing them to make substantial bets on inventory, consumer trends and economic conditions. This challenge is magnified in the world of retail boating, where inaccurate commitment planning of luxury boats can inflate inventory costs. Using IBM business analytics, MarineMax can tap into multiple years of sales history, enabling managers to better understand customer demand trends and more confidently establish future commitments, adjusting forecasts throughout the year based on sales activities.

Similar efficiencies have been experienced in the Marketing department. MarineMax participates in hundreds of key marketing and sales events every year, such as boat shows, which require considerable labor and material resources to run effectively. IBM analytics provides marketing executives stronger visibility into the true cost and return on investment of each event. By easily identifying top and bottom performing events, MarineMax can focus efforts only on those events that drive greater returns, and has reduced their annual marketing costs significantly while still maintaining industry leading market share.

IBM also underpins the company’s Management By Objectives (MBO) program for employee performance, which helps employees clearly understand corporate objectives and identify their individual or team responsibilities. Using IBM technology, store managers can establish individual goals, monitor team member performance, take corrective measures when necessary, then roll information up to the store, region and company levels to quickly determine the impact on payroll.

“IBM business analytics and performance management is helping us achieve a smarter and more efficient operational model,” said Jeremy Wilson, Vice President of Information Technology at MarineMax. “The company is now better able to strengthen collaboration between finance, human resources, marketing, and store operations, ensuring MarineMax remains agile in responding to market challenges, capitalizing on new opportunities and providing the best shopping experience for our customers.”

In the retail world, success is premised on building customer loyalty and trust by getting the right product into the hands of the consumer at the right time. Yet every year, the retail industry loses $93 billion in missed sales due to not having the right products in stock.

“IBM analytics helps chains like Marine Max eliminate inefficiency and align supply with demand, putting them in a stronger position to better serve the new breed of empowered consumer,” said Patricia Vekich Waldron, worldwide distribution sector executive at IBM.

This effort with MarineMax reflects IBM’s focus on helping retailers use their information as a strategic asset. IBM recently created a new Business Analytics & Optimization services organization, with 4,000 consultants who can help clients get up and running with deep analytics capabilities, and made significant acquisitions in the analytics space such as the recent $1.2 billion acquisition of SPSS and the $4.9 billion purchase of Cognos in 2008.

MarineMax’s analytics and performance management system includes IBM Cognos BI and IBM Cognos Planning, IBM Infosphere Master Data Management Server, IBM Websphere Commerce and IBM Websphere DataStage.

The GPL is the most widely used open source software license. Currently, more than 60% of open source projects tracked on freshmeat.org are GPL-licensed. The GPL is well understood by the market and the legal community and has notable precedents such as MySQL, Java and the Linux kernel as GPL licensed projects. Because the GPL is what’s known as a “reciprocal license” it ensures that the software is open and remains open.

Conducted by independent analyst Nigel Pendse and BARC, The Business Application Research Center, The BI Survey 7 compiled the BI experiences of nearly 2,000 respondents. The Survey found that MicroStrategy had the highest Web Deployment Rate of 79.2%, meaning 79.2% of MicroStrategy’s customers reported that they have deployed BI via the Web to at least 50% of their
users.

                       BI Product        Web Deployment Rates (%)

                       MicroStrategy               79.2

                       Cognos Reporting            66.3

                       Cognos Analysis             56.0

                       BusinessObjects             52.9

                       SAP BW                      35.4

                       Hyperion Essbase            32.8

                       Crystal Reports             30.9

According to The BI Survey 7, BI applications deployed via the Web deliver greater business value and benefits than those deployed via client/server technology. Information reach is improved, and setup and maintenance costs are significantly reduced.

“Since the inception of this Survey, MicroStrategy sites have had the highest rates for Web deployment,” said Nigel Pendse, author of The BI Survey 7. “The MicroStrategy product line was designed from the ground up for large scale Web deployments, rather than being converted from older desktop or client/server architectures as other vendors have chosen to do. This provides an advantage for MicroStrategy’s customers, who report on far more data, to more users, and who are much more likely to be Web connected than those using other products.”

“We are pleased that The BI Survey, once again, found that MicroStrategy customers have greater success in deploying BI via the Web than customers of other BI providers,” said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy’s COO. “The Web continues to be a highly effective delivery mechanism for deploying BI to large user populations. MicroStrategy’s full-featured Web interface provides an intuitive array of one-click actions to make business users highly productive in their viewing and exploration of data.”

The BI Survey is an annual report based on the world’s largest independent survey of Business Intelligence (BI) and Performance Management (PM) users in the world. The BI Survey 7 is published by BARC (The Business Application Research Center), and the author, Nigel Pendse, is a highly respected industry expert and lead analyst for The OLAP Report. With over 1,900 users and consultants plus 365 vendor staff participating in The BI Survey 7, the analysis covers a broad range of business intelligence tools.

“The addition of Teragram’s domain expertise and NLP technology will change the landscape of the BI and analytics markets,” said SAS CEO Jim Goodnight. “Teragram’s technologies augment, strengthen and extend SAS’ ability to combine structured and unstructured data – not only in our text mining solution but embedded across the entire SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform – to drive better answers faster.”

Teragram, a 40-person firm headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., will be run as a SAS company. Terms of the acquisition deal were not disclosed. Teragram’s NLP technology is well-established, with a customer base including CNN, Forbes.com, NYTimes Digital, Sony, WashingtonPost.com, Wolters Kluwer, the World Bank and Yahoo!

“As the data explosion continues, companies need an intelligent way to make sense of it all, whether data is in structured databases or in the huge variety of unstructured sources,” said Yves Schabes, President of Teragram. “Teragram and its technology fit perfectly into SAS’ analytics and text mining efforts, as SAS continues to innovate in this rapidly growing market. We’re pleased to join a company that delivers the software businesses need to blend structured and unstructured data and reach better, timelier and more accurate decisions.”

Natural Language Processing

Teragram’s natural language processing (NLP) technologies help turn text – in many languages and from many sources – into useable information. NLP enables richer data processing at the level of words, linguistic relations and word meanings. Teragram has developed and maintains large annotated dictionaries containing several hundred million words in more than 30 languages.

Automatic Categorization

Teragram’s advanced categorization technologies provide instant, advanced classification of documents according to custom criteria, applied throughout the organization. This enables faster and more accurate access to documents organized by specific topics that match the interest of a given user, regardless of the original document’s location.

Natural Language Enterprise Search

For enterprise search, Teragram’s NLP technologies scan structured corporate databases and unstructured sources including text-based reports and Web pages to provide comprehensive answers from these multiple information sources.

“With today’s multinational companies and distributed workforces, as well as tremendous amounts of data in disparate systems and formats, it’s more important than ever to get quick and accurate answers to key business questions,” said Schabes. “Enterprise search is a competitive weapon for tapping an organization’s existing data resources. Combining SAS’ business intelligence, data integration and advanced analytics with Teragram’s NLP technologies will deliver answers to search queries in seconds.”

Teragram’s sophisticated search capabilities deliver an easy-to-use environment for BI, extending the availability and use of BI throughout organizations. The combination of SAS and Teragram technologies provides indexing driven not just by a report’s header, but by its actual content and the metadata associated with it.

Mobile Search

Teragram also brings SAS the next generation of mobile search, helping individuals scan information remotely and get answers faster. Using Teragram’s mobile search technology, individuals can store and retrieve information, connect to outside applications such as BI systems, and search databases from their BlackBerry, smart phone or other mobile device.

An Explosion in Unstructured Data

Business management expert Bill Jensen first decried the downsides of today’s information explosion back in 2001, in his book “Simplicity.” According to his research, echoed by others, the most conservative estimates currently show that business information is doubling every eighteen months. This data flood has only grown more pronounced in recent years, and much of this data lies outside traditional, “structured” databases. According to estimates, unstructured data comprises up to 70% of all business data. This unstructured data resides in customer comments and service notes, e-mail and chat threads, documents and surveys, blogs and RSS feeds, warranty claims, resumes, voicemail and phone logs, among other sources.

If businesses fail to include this unstructured data in their analyses – of customers, market opportunities, internal operations, supply chains, etc. – they are only seeing part of the complete picture, and can make bad decisions as a result. Powerful analytics like SAS’ can help organizations weave structured and unstructured data to uncover hidden patterns and trends, and then use this insight to make better decisions, solve problems and take advantage of opportunities.

SAS: A Pioneer in Text Mining

SAS has offered text mining capabilities within its software for more than a decade, and launched a specific text-mining product, SAS Text Miner, in 2002.

Today, SAS Text Miner is included in several industry-specific solutions, including SAS Warranty Analysis. Manufacturers such as Sub-Zero and Shanghai General Motors use this solution to bring together and analyze warranty claims and service data, much of it unstructured. They can discover potential problems early enough to take quick action, leading to improved product quality and enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Banks use text analytics on transcripts of customer calls and related metadata (such as length of call, hold time, number of transfers) to determine customers’ satisfaction sentiment and predict outcomes (is a customer a good credit risk or are they likely to close an account, for example). Insurance companies use text analytics on adjusters’ claim notes and demographic information to detect possible fraudulent claims.

“Many companies hoping to compete on the strength of their data are running into hurdles because they can’t provide enough people access to all the data they need to execute more effectively,” said David Stodder, vice president and research director at industry analyst firm Ventana Research. “Companies should evaluate integrated solutions like the one stemming from the Pentaho-Vertica partnership, which could enable companies to affordably equip more workers with state-of-the-art BI software and give them faster ad-hoc access to larger amounts of historical and real-time data so they can innovate sooner and better than competitors.”

This partnership gives companies a blueprint for extending comprehensive data analysis throughout the enterprise. Connecting easy-to-use BI tools on employees’ desktops with high-performance database management systems sets the stage for self-service analytics. As more employees become empowered to make critical business decisions, a company can gain a market advantage by capitalizing more quickly on business opportunities. Moreover, the simplicity of this solution enables IT staff to spend less time on setup and tuning, and more time delivering invaluable information in the form of dashboards and reports to a wider audience.

“BI tools and database management systems deliver the best business results if they’re accessible to a broad group of employees,” said Richard Daley, founder and CEO of Pentaho. “Making more data available to more people faster and more conveniently helps companies be more agile and competitive, which is paramount to success today and is the promise of this partnership.”

The Vertica® Analytic Database delivers query results 50 to 200 times faster than other databases. Vertica’s RDBMS enables business people to make complex, ad hoc queries on the fly and affordably. Vertica also allows mixed workloads because users can continue making queries while data is loaded into the system, eliminating the wait and sluggish performance many databases experience during loading. Breakthrough data compression allows the Vertica Database to reduce storage requirements by as much as 90 percent, dramatically cutting hardware overhead and energy consumption so that customers can analyze larger amounts of historical data at a fraction of the cost.

The Pentaho Open BI suite provides a comprehensive BI platform for reporting, analysis, dashboards, data mining, and data integration. Pentaho’s platform consists of four key elements: Pentaho Analysis, based on Pentaho’s popular Mondrian open source online analytical processing (OLAP) server, lets users pose questions in business terms; Pentaho Reporting lets users create, generate and distribute rich and sophisticated report content from all sources of information; Pentaho Data Integration, based on Pentaho’s Kettle data integration project, uses extract, transform and load (ETL) technology to gather data from multiple sources and integrate it for faster, easier access and analysis; and Weka machine-learning software simplifies data mining.

The Vertica Analytic Database integrates with the entire Pentaho suite to enable companies to optimize storage space and complex/ad hoc query speed within a comprehensive BI platform. “This partnership delivers on the largely unrealized potential of BI technology by making it usable, affordable and critical to business success,” said Ralph Breslauer, CEO of Vertica. “With this integration, companies can not only learn more about their customers and their markets, but they can also access that information quickly and immediately capitalize on it to gain a competitive advantage.”

The release is an important milestone for fulfilling the company’s aspirations for providing practical and affordable Corporate Performance Management and Operational BI solutions. By merely expanding on the usability of data and existing IT infrastructure and technologies coupled with less training requirements that will result in better user take up and participation; ElegantJ BI ensures in giving companies the opportunity to make the most of their IT investments.
ElegantJ BI can be deployed to Plan, Monitor, Analyze, Direct and Improve corporate performance through scorecards and KPI implementations, for proactive, forward looking and competitive enterprises. It’s easier to monitor critical business metrics, be alerted about issues, manage goals, and track performance across the organisation. When used for Operational BI, it empowers executives, line-of-business managers and other business professionals across the enterprise with effective and efficient on-time, on-demand information critical to maintaining efficient operations and business goals.

Designed for diverse environments, and not limited to any specific type of user; ElegantJ BI will be able to provide a single enterprise data management platform facilitating reliable, consistent, data and information integrated from a range of data sources, applications and third party systems to executive management, managers and distributed teams matching every need of end-to-end business analysis and reporting.

The product is the result of innovation and understanding of customers’ current and future needs in mind. More often since the problem with existing business intelligence tools is that they are not intuitive enough for the “average” business user; managers have to routinely rely on external IT consultants to produce effective BI reports. One of the key aspects of ElegantJ BI is design with ‘simplicity, without compromising the power to deliver’. ElegantJ BI achieves this through an elegant design, deploying state of the art technology to deliver rich business intelligence and reporting functionality directly to the browser – accessible in the office and across the internet.

Built on a single, user-friendly zero footprint browser interface; business users at every level of the organisation can create their own analysis and reports without depending on IT support using key features including intuitive, personalized dashboards; dynamic analysis on the fly with one click drillable reports, high-impact OLAP, graphical visualization of underlying data for deeper insight into information, automated alerts and scheduled reports, and exception management and reporting. Requiring no software to be installed for end users, it’s fast to roll out and requires minimal maintenance. Also, being delivered on a scalable, consistent high-performance platform, ElegantJ BI will meet the increasing data volumes, user base and information needs, anytime in the future.

The Mobile Dashboard allows administrators, working from a Web browser, to configure mobile users of devices such as RIM BlackBerry, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Palm Treo, and Java-enabled smartphones to receive pre-existing, internal reports from spreadsheets or business applications right on those devices. The reports are dynamically generated and preserve the look and feel of each handheld device, tailoring themselves to the native screen sizes.

The Mobile Dashboard Appliance is a completely preconfigured, self-contained server providing the Mobile Dashboard service that fits in a standard rack and delivers the Mobile Dashboard to upwards of 500 mobile users, with clusters supporting up to 10,000. Its installation is essentially “turnkey,” and it can be securely configured and managed with a simple, Web-based interface.

The appliance will prove particularly valuable to companies that prefer to maintain their critical information behind the firewall, rather than using a hosted outside service.

Top markets for the Webalo Mobile Dashboard Appliance are financial services, healthcare, and government sectors, as well as any company that would benefit from the simple delivery of critical business intelligence and reports to its mobile workforce. Webalo’s Mobile Dashboard Service is a highly secure hosted service, which while ideal for most applications, may be impermissible in the most sensitive markets such as those mentioned. The Mobile Dashboard Appliance neatly solves this problem.

“Competition for the right to manage an organization’s money is fierce. The timely provisioning of strategic data to sales and service personnel helps both to attract and to retain clients,” said Charles Morse, Vice President of Loomis Sayles. “However, data security is a big concern for any financial services company and its clients. Why ship data to a delivery vehicle when the delivery vehicle can be brought to the data? The Mobile Dashboard Appliance removes an important risk factor from the security equation.”

The Mobile Dashboard Appliance is a pre-configured, 2U rack mount server with Gigabit Ethernet. The Appliance supports scheduled backups of encrypted data via SMB or NFS, and can be configured for automatic updates from Webalo. Once it has been installed on the enterprise network, it can be administered by business intelligence professionals or other employees with basic Web and Microsoft Excel skills.

“Many of our customers and systems integrator partners have been asking for a version of the Mobile Dashboard service that they can host internally,” said Peter Price, Webalo’s president and CEO. “With the appliance, we are now able to serve this large segment of a market that wants easy mobile information access but must meet heightened compliance requirements.

“We have chosen to name the company after our core technology and product, PivotLink,” said David L. Weld, president and chief executive officer of SeaTab Software. “The PivotLink name is known to the tens of thousands of people who use PivotLink every day to run their businesses. The brand will scale well as we continue to grow the company and to extend our platform and solution set.”

“For almost 10 years, PivotLink has delivered solutions to direct customers and for partners on top of the PivotLink Framework,” said Q. “Ching” Wan, founder and chief technology officer of PivotLink. “By continuing to enhance our data platform and by offering new solutions, both directly and through partners, we will be able to deliver more and more value to our customers. In particular, we will be able to continue to deliver business intelligence with extremely compelling price/performance to a much broader section of the mid-market, an important and dramatically underserved segment.”

PivotLink is the provider of business intelligence solutions that meet the needs of organizations in a variety of industries. Our PivotLink Solutionsâ„¢ and the PivotLink Frameworkâ„¢ data platform put the full power of business intelligence in the hands of people who need it, with tailored environments for each user from the CEOs to line employee. PivotLink’s unique, self-directed reporting and analytics are based on the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) delivery model and provide users with complete analytical freedom without requiring IT involvement.

As a result of the recently announced acquisitions of Cognos by IBM and Business Objects by SAP, customers of these two BI vendors may have concerns about ongoing product support, product direction, and migration efforts. The MicroStrategy License Replacement program enables customers of Cognos and Business Objects to trade in their existing BI licenses for MicroStrategy licenses at little or no replacement cost.

“The big three former independent BI players have fallen like dominos this year, aligning themselves with application/database vendors and trading market heft for independence,” said Wayne Eckerson, Director, TDWI Research. “This obviously presents a great opportunity for remaining independent players to capture the sizable segment of customers who prefer best-of-breed tools versus an all-in-one stack pushed by aggressive account teams selling everything from servers and databases to applications and services.”

Customers of other BI vendors often switch to MicroStrategy to benefit from the increased performance, scalability, and data visualization that MicroStrategy offers. Several examples of MicroStrategy customers that have switched from other BI vendors are Corporate Express, La Poste, and Dick’s Sporting Goods.

Corporate Express selected MicroStrategy as its enterprise BI standard and replaced its existing installation. By migrating from its previous solution to MicroStrategy, Corporate Express was able to achieve greater efficiencies and faster access to the information they needed. Corporate Express recently expanded its use of MicroStrategy to provide more than 10,000 customers with an online reporting application, enabling them to run reports and analyze data related to their office supply purchases.

La Poste, which operates the postal service of France, replaced its BI provider and chose MicroStrategy to support its sophisticated Human Resource (HR) application. With MicroStrategy, La Poste monitors data for 280,000 employees. Managers and operational staff use the HR application to report on and analyze data to efficiently manage personnel objectives across key indicators.

Dick’s Sporting Goods replaced its existing BI installation with the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform(TM). Dick’s Sporting Goods’ employees, including store managers, merchandising analysts, and senior management, use MicroStrategy software to analyze a 2 terabyte Oracle(R) data warehouse. End users are able to perform sales, category, and inventory analyses to more effectively track product sales, product mix, and inventory levels.

“Historically, companies have switched from Business Objects and Cognos to MicroStrategy when they ran into scalability roadblocks,” said MicroStrategy COO Sanju Bansal. “MicroStrategy 8 delivers high scalability with high performance. We have talked with companies who have been dissatisfied with their Business Objects or Cognos systems and want to avoid the turmoil of the transition and migration that will result from the acquisitions of these vendors. This replacement program is intended to ease the adoption of MicroStrategy by lowering or eliminating the acquisition cost of MicroStrategy licenses.”